If you think that your dog has changed in his tendency to pay attention to you over time, you are probably right. A new study is the first to describe the developmental changes in dogs’ attention over their entire life.

The researchers concluded that dogs (at least of this breed) show predictable changes in attentiveness, which they define as the ability to choose to process some environmental stimuli over others, as they age. Their major findings were:

Dogs of all ages attend more to people with objects than to objects alone.

Older dogs are less interested in novel objects in the environment than younger dogs are.

Dogs between 3 and 6 years of age were fastest to return their attention to a person after finding food on the floor.

Adolescent dogs improve their performance at attention tasks more rapidly than other age groups. So, while these young dogs may not give their attention quickly to a person on the first trial, when rewarded for doing so, they get better after just a few repetitions.

The changes in attention over time seen in these dogs are similar to the patterns observed in humans, which means that dogs may provide good models for studying the phenomenon.